Lightspeed Blog

Jon Puleston

Vice President of Innovation
Jon Puleston is Lightspeed's Vice President of Innovation. In this role, he heads QuestionArts, an international team specializing in the design of surveys and the development of specialist tools and technology for conducting research in the online and mobile arena. Additionally, he serves as a consultant on survey design best practice to companies around the world.

Over the last few years he and his team have won multiple awards for their ground breaking research on research exploring survey design methodology and in particular for their work in the field of gamification of research, survey optimization and prediction science.

Recent Posts

By engaging with consumers in meaningful ways, you’ll capture data on what they think, what content they see and what they do. Our Modern Survey Design techniques enable you to know more by asking the right questions in the right way.

The GRIT 2017 Q3-Q4 Report is now available for download at GreenBook, and below you can find one of the key sections: the Challenges & Opportunities for the industry. Jon Puleston of Lightspeed, with contributions from Ryan Soulet of the MSU MMR program and Tom Anderson of OdinText, led the charge in analyzing thousands of verbatim responses to the questions we asked about challenges, solutions, and opportunities for the industry in the year ahead. This gives us a quick read on where the “heads and hearts” of researchers are and offers a glimpse of where the industry may be going. This blog first appeared on the GreenBook blog as part of their GRIT Sneak Peek.

From the moment I get up in the morning to the last thing at night I am immersed in information gathering.

News was something I used to read once a day. Ever since having a smart phone, my propensity to consume news has slowly increased month by month, and with the ever increasing proliferation of news aggregation apps, it’s becoming something I dip into almost every spare moment during the day. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and last thing I do at night before switching off my phone is check the “news.” It has become a total addiction. In addition to news there is social media, which I consume with equal levels of hunger, be it Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. When I run out of new information from these sources to consume, I switch to doing things like looking through pictures on Instagram or virtual shopping on eBay.

1.Have an intelligent conversation with your gut instinct!

Gut instincts are incredibly valuable when it comes to making a prediction, the best predictors often heavily rely on their gut instincts, but remember that your gut can be flawed. Your instinct is exactly that, an instinct, so any cognitive or emotional biases you have could impede your predictive success.

If you study the art of film making, it will tell you that a good film script is based around one great question. This question captures your attention from the beginning; the story that naturally emerges slowly reveals the answer. The 'question' drives the entire story.

Question: What if every day was the same? Movie: Groundhog Day

Question: What if a nun was made to be a nanny? Movie: The Sound of Music

Question: What if a really smart, innocent person went to prison? Movie: Shawshank Redemption

Question: What if dreams and reality were inter-changeable? Movie: The Matrix

Question: What if there's more to life than being ridiculously good looking? Movie: Zoolander

As market researchers we like to classify people and in particular we like to classify how people make decisions, but we have a dreadful habit of thinking that there are different types of people who think and make decision in these different ways. We define segments like loyalist and switchers, impulse vs. considered shoppers.

This blog post is a short introduction to the science of prediction which is a topic that I have been totally immersed in over the last new months and recently presented about at the 2014 ESOMAR Congress with Hubertus Hofkirchner. I thought I would share some of what I have learned.

Was updating your tracking study on your list of New Year’s Resolutions, but you just haven’t been able to muster the courage to do it? We know that the mere thought of tackling this project can strike fear in the heart of even the bravest researcher. It may have taken you years to get your tracker right, and you have years of tracking data to deal with. Still, in many cases it is well worth the effort. If you find yourself in one of the situations discussed below, you should pluck up your valor and forge ahead.

When it comes to conducting multi-country research studies, our research has shown that the way questions are posed to respondents can greatly influence the results of surveys. In fact, question design factors are the single most important means of improving the overall quality of data.